18 June 2017 (Post Sirk:Mass Camp; Genre and the Women's Film)Click on the dates to access the earlier posts. To come shortly: The Legacy (14), Sources (15), An Afterword: The American Family on Screen (16).

Bruce is a long time cinephile, scholar and writer on cinema across a broad range of subjects. The study being posted in parts is among the longest and most detailed ever devoted to the work of Douglas Sirk. In the following text films in Italics are regarded as key films in the director’s career. References to authors of other critical studies will be listed in a bibliography which will conclude the essay.

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Douglas Sirk

In 1971 Sirk stated
to Jon Halliday: “Sometimes thinking of myself, it seems to me that I am
looking at one of those goddam split characters out of my pictures.” In quoting
this, Gerd Gemunden in his introduction to the special Sirk issue of Film
Criticism in 1999,concluded that “if one looks at Sirk criticism of
the last decades it appears that there is not so much a split Sirk but multiple
Sirks.” Halliday's book-length interview set the tone of much that was to
follow “often leading to interpretations of the films according to the
director's own instructions and accepting at face value many of Sirk's
statements without bothering to check facts.” It can be argued that Halliday
prompted Sirk to assume the stance of a sophisticated auteur and was all too
eager to promote him as a man of of the Left. The early readings of Sirk in
Britain and America sought to extend the Halliday counter-position for him in
reclamation from the critics who either ignored or dismissed him and the public
who embraced his melodramas “for the wrong reasons.” While auteurist and
structuralist critics emphasised continuities between Sierck and Sirk over
ruptures, those who promoted his cause as a political auteur or subversive
modernist either ignored his Ufa films or relegated them to apprenticeship
status. (Klinger 8) Whatever their complexion most critics (some exceptions
have been noted above) largely ignored the early independently produced Sirk
films in America. Gemunden notes that the majority of German critics identified
Sirk with the genre in which he was most successful – melodrama - which they
generally dismissed as trash. Gemundsen also notes that at least two of Sirk's
harshest critics were later among the supporters of Fassbinder.

Zarah Leander (front)

“Since in Germany
the shadows of Nazi cinema loom larger,” Gemunden suggests, “celebrations of
Sirk always sounded echoes of Sierck.”Some German critics saw Sirk's work – both German and American - as
'tainted', that Sierck was no Weimar director. Fritz Gottler suggested the need
for a dialogue between the various Sirks reflected in research of the 80s and
90s emphasising the historical context of production and reception of
individual films detailing some continuities but also many differences between
Sierck and Sirk complicating the image of subversive auteurist capable of
imposing a critique of society. In an essay seemingly written as a provocative
response to the British and American “discovery” of his work, Prof. Gertrud
Koch also maintains “that Sirk's work must be historicised if its complexities
are to be fully appreciated.”However
Koch then goes on to assert that Sirk was an opportunistic director whose films
represent an ideology that is compatible with both Nazi Germany and the
conservative climate of the Eisenhower era. She contends that he discovered
that, blinded by melodramatic content, the typical viewer missed the social
critique. But in her attack on Sirk, Koch goes much further. In contrast to the
Screen critics, she reads Sirk's ambiguity of style negatively,reiterating
the continuity between Sierck and Sirk in what she calls his system of double
articulation.Koch further argues that
Sirk's American melodramas are simply a continuation of the supposed “Nazi
aesthetics” of his Ufa films in a cinema providing Goebbels's culture industry
with a much desired cult of stardom, claiming “the fascination and horror” in
the ambiguous duplicity of “an authoritarian and evil gaze – with Sirk the
sadist, a direct descendant of Sierck der Sadist.” Here Koch is using
particularly provocative terminology in what she sees as Sirk's portrayal of
women (epitomised by Zarah Leander's stardom especially inZu neuen Ufern) and in strong rebuttal of Fassbinder's claim
for “the tenderness and love for all human beings” he found in Sirk's
films.

Charles Boyer, The First Legion

As already outlined,
from the early 1970s a generation of Sirk scholars accessed the cultural status
of Sirk'sGerman and American films
through formal analysis revealing their 'true political significance' while largely
removing them from the terms of their popular reception. By placingtwo critical landmarks in Sirk's career, Zu
neuen Ufern and The First Legion, against each other Lutz Koepnick
believes that Sirk's attempt to clarify the boundaries of art and the location
of culture in modern society in his films can be best understood by “rethinking
Sirk's negotiation of the high and the low, of modernist sensibility and
popular diversion.”

Zu Neuen Ufern

Halliday claimed Ufern
as a masterpiece (see Part 2) and expressed surprise that
such a film could be made in Germany in 1937. For German critics like Koepnick
and Koch, Ufern, as a strangely ambivalent melodramatic force field,
orchestrates what was at the top of Goebbels's cinematic agenda, namely the
mutual absorption ofthe high and the
low culture, of artistic merit and popular appeal, which “illustrates the
Nazis' hope to redefine and exploit mass culture as a political tool, a
crucible of fantasy production powerful enough to permit a restricted revolt
against Nazi ideology while at the same time breaking older bonds of solidarity
and fragmenting the body politic into a multitude of pleasure-seeking monads.”
This amounts to a form of 'repressive tolerance', part of a project “to
establish an economic alternative to Hollywood by creating the illusion in that
highly politicized society that certain spaces remained beyond control, beyond
politics.” Sirk was required to effectively deliver for the Nazis the image of
Zarah Leander, Ufa's new star, in what to Koch initially amounts to “a
repulsive image of female sexuality, a sadistic impulse...only then to resort
to ritual acts of cleansing, Sirk privileging a gaze that moves from aversion
to purification (linking) this authoritarian logic to a conservative project of
cultural criticism.”

Although set in
England and Australia Ufern reveals Sirk's preoccupation with things
American even prior to his exile. Koepnick sees it as “deeply enmeshed in the
cultural vocabulary of Nazi Americanism,” finally the “collapsing of competing
cultural practices into the vision of a unified, homogeneous culture, bearing
testimony to how Nazi mass culture emulated what was considered American
patterns of perception and identification.” Kopenick then asks the question: to
what extent did Sirk transfer from a state-run to a capital-driven industrial
culture his “eschatological visions,” i.e., his recognition, as a non-believer,
of the important role of religion in the cultural unification of bourgeois
society?

As acknowledged above, Sirk explained to Halliday
the importance of religion as “a pillar of bourgeois society even as organised
religion may have lost its role in sanctifying norms and providing metaphysical
securities... (while) its symbolic vocabulary seems to speak to a disenchanted
age.”Sirk resorts to the charm of religious signs in his
melodramas to bind together images, narratives and passions, to construe
fictional worlds in which an overabundance of meaning may underscore or
even counteract the profane disintegration of bourgeois society. Melodrama in
the hands of Sirk reinvents the sacred in the hope of redeeming religion
from its institutional decay...The priest's bygone sorcery reemerges as the
magic of the film director who understands how to stir the imagination and
captivate our emotions. (Koepnick)

The First Legion explicitly dwells on Sirk's continuous preoccupation
with religion. Further to the discussion in part 3 above “in contrast to the
final images in Zu neuen Ufern, The First Legion offers little
doubt that such a mutual integration of high and low (some priests in the film
hope to link their esoteric practice to the crowd outside) cannot result in
anything but a false unity, in delusion rather than insight or redemption.” The
projection as the film-within-the film of one of the priest's films shot in
India, coincides with the first (fake) miracle. In
Koepnick's reading : …these projected images fragment the assembled
priests into “voyeuristic” individual beings (or what Koepnick refers to as
“monads”) while
reintegrating them as consumers in a new kind of imaginary community in which,
unlike that in Ufern, the visual field of the missionin Sirk's
mise en scène, remains inauthentic: incoherent, uncontained and
disjointed. In Ufern Koepnick questions the authenticity of Sirk's
strategy which he refers to as his “theological utopia of reconciliation” in an
untrammelled drive towards forms of collectivity in line with Goebbels's
above mentioned cinematic agenda, namely “the mutual absorption of the
high and low.” In contrast to the mass spectacle of unification in Ufern
Koepnick sees the second mracle in Legion delivering “a utopian image of
individual redemption and reconciliation” while also demonstrating that the
achievement of this image is the result of “systematic acts of exclusion.” In
the mise en scène of the second miracle Sirk seems to renounce Legion's
fragmented visual logic where the “reassertion of authentic seeing” - the final
montage in the enclosure of the chapel - carries the possible suggestion of “a
new unified community,” while at the same time reminding the viewer of the
condition of separation and exclusion that has previously prevailed.

The First Legion

In the second
miracle the representation of Terry's vision in the chapel, at once both
utopian and dystopian Koepnick suggests, does not involve a glossing over of
the “social fragmentation and dialectical split of modern culture.” The
FirstLegion “insists on the boundaries between high art and trash,
aesthetic cultivation and mass culture.” Ufern, on the other hand
“exposes to view in critical fashion the very mechanisms that make and mark
stars; the film seeks to undo the dialectics of modern culture, renounce the
split between high and low, and overcome what makes stars cultural commodities
in the first place...The film tells a story of the division of modern culture
into commodified spectacles of popular entertainment on the one hand and the
highly exclusive aesthetic refinement and social representation on the
other...over artistic expressivity as a step into a realm of inauthenticity.”

Zarah Leander in Parramatta Jail, Zu Neuen Ufern

Leander as Gloria Vane is presented in a variety of perspectives, from euphoria
in London to suffering as a prisoner in Parramatta jail, as a pretext to
suspend the overall narrative to supply a variety of intimate looks at the face
and body of the star. In thepassage of
the film from London to Sydney, Koepnick sees Sirk deploying melodrama's power
to redeem the individual from theexcesses of both the popular and the elite, “melodramatic sensibilities
as catalysts for acts of spiritual purification and elevation.” Unlike the
ending in Ufern, The First Legion “resists any image of of social
and cultural reconciliation; high and low remain locked in a melodramatic
dialectic of good and evil, light and dark...The film's final montage sequence
valorizes aesthetic self expression over mass cultural kitsch, the bliss of
mimesis over the popular's reinvention, of aura as commodity and consumer
choice.”

In perhaps the most
searching critique of the cultural politics of Sirk's work on both sides of the
Atlantic, Koepnick recognises The First Legion, made at a critical
juncture in Sirk's life,as the seminal evocation of Sirk's recognition
of his foray into a hybrid existence in implicitly not affirming the philosopher of the Frankfurt School,
Theodor Adorno's equation of Nazi Germany and the American culture industry as
“uncanny soul brothers.” For Koepnick, Sirk's American productions in varying
degrees “remind us to call into question critical models that compare national
cultures or envisage cross-cultural transactions yet do little to challenge
assumptions about national or cultural fixity.” Koepnick nevertheless finds it
highly questionable that Sirk's later melodramas for Universal really lived up
to the program spelled out, if somewhat ambiguously, in The First Legion.

In “bringing
Hollywood home in Zu neuen Ufern,” Koepnick speculates on “whether the
film encodes a curious preview of coming attractions authored by a director on
the brink of departing from Nazi Germany for America itself.”In their vindication of Sirk, most critics
saw the Universal (melo)dramas as both continuing and exceeding the critical
aspirations of his films at Ufa and more significantly Sirk's key earlier films
in America such as Scandal in Paris and TheFirst Legion,
thus failing to properly recognise the implications of his work holistically in
what Koepnick refers to as “a site of cultural syncretism.” In these terms Sirk
is the identifier and reconciler of cultural differences, rather than the
European art director “smuggling his aesthetic refinement into the camp of the
enemy.” While recognising the sophisticated strategies of form-centred critical
formulation, as referred to above, Koepnick criticises the reliance of these
critics on “highly conventional notions of cultural and national identity.”
Koepnick further questions the image of Sirk “as an undercover artist simply
dismantling American culture and identity.” To him “it is the remaining
paradox, challenge, and scandal of Sirk's American work that it sought to
examine propositions with the means of industrial culture itself, that it
aspired to elevate mass culture to a laboratory of aesthetic reflection.” In
linking extravagant mise en scène to the demands of 1950s consumer society
Barbara Klinger (p.66-7) suggests that style may have been more to do with the
“socially influenced industry demands to render (it) consumable” than to
autonomous artistic decisions of the director. It would seem necessary at this stage to
at least concede a synthesis of these two demands in his style. In other words
an element of syncretism (Sirk at once reconciling the demands of art and
commerce through his mise en scène) is needed to explain both the aesthetic
singularity and commercial success of the films at Universal.

Linda Schulte-Sasse
has attempted to rescue Sirk from what she calls “the backlash discourse” to
again make him the cornerstone of a cinema of aesthetic resistance. She argues
that Sirk's German and American films provide all viewers (and not just film
critics) with “a reflexive space,” a textuality that interrupts processes of
identification and absorption in the plot thus allowing the audience to create
layers of meaning other than those carried by the narrative. She is careful to
point out that this novel space is not one of agency (in the Brechtian sense)
but merely allows the expression of a (utopian) desire. Gemunden in turn points
out that this theorising of space as a formal but not a political category does
not address the issue central to an understanding of Nazi cinema, namely how
private expression of desire is determined by the public sphere. Ironically,
Gemunden concludes, Schulte-Sasse's position on this lends support to backlash
criticism.

In addition to his
theorising on Hollywood melodrama Thomas Elsaesser also researched Sirk's
German work in theatre and film and sees him as a cultural pragmatist who had
not too much difficulty in coming to terms with Hollywood because it reminded
him of the tradition of European popular theatre. Fritz Gottler, on the other
hand, saw a certain naiveté in Sirk's attempt to position his work in a larger
European tradition of popular theatre and called for “an end to all the talk of
elegance and artifice, melodramas not being the haute cuisine of cinema but its
fast food.” It does seem that while English and American critical engagements
with Sirk from a post Cahiers/Halliday perspective were prescient of the post
modern erasure of thehigh art - low art
distinction, the German backlash against Sirk from academic critics came with a
Frankfurt School perspective.

Koch's attack on
Sirk's integrity, referred to above, is contradicted by Julian Petley in his
essay on Sirk's German films in which he sees the continuity between Sirk's Ufa
and Universal melodramas in a quite different light. Before moving into film
Sirk had established both his political integrity and “how purely formal
elements can be used against the grain” on the stage culminating in 1933 with
his production of Georg Kaiser's anti-Nazi parable Der Silbersee that
outraged the SA - Nazi supporters tried to barrack it off the stage to the
displeasure of the audience. The scandal prompted Sirk's departure from theatre
to Ufa. Halliday comments that Sirk's films at Ufa showed what could still be
made in Germany in 1937. This is at least partly explicable in terms of the
genre - the trio of melodramas that Sirk directed in 1936-7. In a film like La
Habanera,

La Habanera

Eric Rentschler suggests, subversive aesthetics were “an
orchestrated and integral part of the Nazi film industry” demonstrating that “excess, irony and distanciation can
reaffirm rather than destabilise the status quo”(The Ministry of Illusion:
Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife) in a manner similar to much Hollywood
melodrama. In contrast to Sirk's German
critics Petley sees this as a kind of “controlled transgression” through excess
which is “inherently destabilising” of ideology. Melodrama he suggests is
especially suited to displacement of structures of identification and
heightened realism into unstable perceptual relations. In spite (or because of)
the great success of Sirk's two 'woman's melos starring Zarah Leander, this
would explain why, in the climate of extreme sexism and misogyny in the Third
Reich, such melodrama tended to be marginalised in favour of more ideologically
stable genres (nationalistic drama, romantic comedies, musicals and comedies).
In classic Hollywood it was more a case of reconciling, hence stabilising, the
actual economic and aesthetic processes of production with the social and
cultural forces of reception.

End Note

1. In the context of Koepnick's analysis of
Sirk's flexible responses to changing cultural and political agendas, we need
to recognise, I think, that Goebbels was a cinephile with a quite sophisticated
understanding of the power of cinema. He deployed (or had the intention to
deploy) authoritarian power to manipulate high art and popular culture in what
I've suggested was a sophisticated form of repressive tolerance.

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This is a blog devoted to things of interest to cinephiles. The subjects are randomly selected in the manner of a diary and are somewhat oriented to Sydney, Australia. In the past I used to send out these entries via regular emails but this has trailed off and its best to check here for anything new.You can contact me direct via email at filmalert101@gmail.com